Geography department chair Stuart Aitken will be working with the izbrisani in Slovenia.

Three SDSU faculty members were recognized for their scholarly research by the Fulbright Scholar program, which sends U.S. faculty and professionals abroad for a minimum of two weeks up to a full academic year.

Stuart Aitken, chair of the geography department, will go to Slovenia; and Noah Arceneaux, a professor of journalism and media studies, is headed to India. Their Fulbrights will support the continuation of research they have published at SDSU.

Emeritus Professor Bonnie K. Scott, who received a Fulbright Specialist Scholar award, will spend 20 days in November at Pakistan’s Fatima Jinnah Women University, assisting in the development of a gender studies curriculum.

SDSU Fulbright winners

The three professors join the ranks of 20 previous Fulbright winners from SDSU’s faculty since 2004.

Additionally 11 SDSU students and recent graduates received Fulbright awards for 2013-2014, making SDSU a top Fulbright-producing university for the second time in three years.

Emeritus Professor Bonnie K. Scott will travel to Pakistan's Fatima Jinnah Women University to help develop a gender studies curriculum.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. About 1,600 U.S. students, 4,000 foreign students, 1,200 U.S. scholars and 900 visiting scholars receive awards annually.

Slovenia’s “erased”

Aitken’s research in Slovenia will involve a group known as izbrisani, literally, the erased. These people, largely ethnic Serbs and Croats, were “erased” from the registrar of permanent residents and given guest worker status when Slovenia gained independence in 1991.

Working at Primorska University, Aitken will pull from his past research with the children of the Penguin Revolution in Chile and immigrant families in southeast San Diego to examine the effect of the izbrisani’s undocumented status on the political activities of its children.

Journalism Professor Noah Arcenaux's Fulbright will take him to New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore to study India's mobile phone industry.

Going mobile in India

Arceneaux’s Fulbright will take him to New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore for the spring semester of 2014 to study the country’s mobile phone industry from the perspective of spectrum allocation.

As mobile technology developed in India, the government allocated available frequencies, effectively determining how much content individual companies could deliver, Arceneaux said. His research will examine how those government decisions were made and whether the allocation benefited the largest possible number of consumers.

“I’m hoping to produce research that will be useful to developing countries grappling with spectrum allocation decisions,” he said.

Global links for Pakistan

Scott’s Fulbright award was based on her background in literature and gender studies and her founding role in the University of Delaware’s women’s studies program. At SDSU, she was professor and later chair of the Department of Women’s Studies.

In Pakistan, Scott will work with the university’s faculty to devise new approaches to teaching and curriculum development and create linkages with gender studies departments across the globe.

Scott and three colleagues from SDSU’s women’s studies department — Ann Donadey, Susan Cayleff and Irene Lara — are co-editing a textbook incorporating the field of women’s studies with the humanities. “Women in Culture” will be published by Blackwell Press later this year.